Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary income support to workers who have lost their jobs and are seeking reemployment. This paper reviews the origins of the federal-state UI system in the United States and outlines its principles and goals. It also describes the conditions for benefit...

We replicate and extend a simulation model developed by Jonathan Gruber with the goals of illuminating Gruber’s modeling of health insurance coverage under a tax credit and examining the sensitivity of the results to changes in the model’s key parameters. The replications suggest that a...

The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 introduced a refundable tax credit for low-income working families who purchased health insurance coverage for their children. This health insurance tax credit (HITC) existed during tax years 1991, 1992, and 1993, and was then rescinded. We use...

We estimate the effect of employer offers of retiree health benefits (RHBs) on the timing of retirement using a sample of Health and Retirement Study (HRS) men observed over a period of up to 12 years. We hypothesize that the effect of RHBs differs for workers of different ages - a hypothesis we...

Following the Great Recession, most states’ unemployment insurance (UI) trust funds became insolvent, requiring the states to borrow from the U.S. Treasury to finance benefit payments. This article describes the basics of UI financing and reviews the origins of the financial crisis facing the...

Are early retiree health benefits (RHBs) a form of deferred compensation that binds workers to an employer? Most employers who offer RHBs offer them only to workers who have 10 or more years of tenure with the firm and have reached age 55. Accordingly, workers in firms offering RHBs have an...

Employer-provided health benefit coverage for workers who retire before age 65 has fallen over the last decade. We examine a cohort of male workers from the Health and Retirement Survey to examine questions about the dynamics of retiree health benefits and the relationship between retiree health...

We estimate the effect of employer offers of retiree health benefits (RHBs) on the timing of retirement using a sample of men observed over a period of up to 12 years in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Our main concern is that such estimates may be contaminated by unobserved...

We estimate the earnings losses of a cohort of workers displaced during the Great Recession and decompose those long-term losses into components attributable to fewer work hours and to reduced hourly wage rates. We also examine the extent to which the reduced earnings, work hours, and wages of...

This paper examines the quality of quarterly records on work hours collected from employers in the State of Washington to administer the unemployment insurance (UI) system, specifically to determine eligibility for UI. We subject the administrative records to four "trials," all of which suggest...